Prime is the name of a new restaurant going in the old Bywater Barbecue location at 3162 Dauphine St.

Matt Cummings and Kevin Fruits, the owners of Decadence Shoppe café in the French Quarter, took over the space, with plans to overhaul the menu and the look. Prime will serve pub fare during the day – hamburgers, sandwiches – and step it up to steaks and seafood at night, Cummings said.

Bywater Barbecue, a fixture in the neighborhood for close to two decades, has been shuttered for about a month. Cummings and Fruits are leasing the location from the building’s new owner, with the goal of opening the doors in about 30 days.

Prime is the first of two restaurants the partners are planning this spring. Cummings and Fruits also are working on Comforts, a new casual dining spot in the old Donna’s Bar and Grill location at 806 N. Rampart.

Comforts will be a dinner-only operation, serving foods like mom used to make, if your mom made fried chicken, ostrich fillets, lamb stew and scotch eggs (hard-boiled eggs wrapped in sausage and deep fried).

“We’re playing off the comfort foods idea, but heavily influenced by game meats,” Cummings said. “It’s what your mom used to make, but a little stepped up.”

Cummings and Fruits hail from Indiana, where they owned the first incarnation of Decadence Shoppe. They moved to the French Quarter eight years back, and opened the café at 806 N. Rampart St. three years ago. Decadence is a breakfast and lunch spot offering belly-filling scrambles, biscuits and gravy, French toast and house-made baked goods (chocolate caramel brownies, peanut butter oatmeal chocolate cookies, peanut and jelly brownies).

“We’re both from the Midwest,” he said. “We didn’t grow up with Cajun-Creole type food, so we want to do more Midwestern food with flair.”